Sylvia Berg

GMPV Geochemistry, Mineralogy, Petrology & Volcanology

The 2014 Outstanding Student Poster (OSP) Award is awarded to Sylvia Berg for the poster/PICO entitled:

Making Earth’s earliest continental crust – an analogue from voluminous Neogene silicic volcanism in NE-Iceland (Berg, S. E.; Troll; V. R.; Burchardt, S.; Riishuus, M. S.; Deegan, F. M.; Harris, C.; Whitehouse, M. J.; Gústafsson, L. E.)

Click here to download the poster/PICO file.

Sylvia Berg is a PhD student at the Centre for Experimental Mineralogy, Petrology & Geochemistry (CEMPEG) at the Department of Earth Sciences, Uppsala University, Sweden, and is co-affiliated to the Nordic Volcanological Center (NordVulk, Iceland). She is supervised by Prof. Valentin R. Troll (Uppsala University), Dr. Steffi Burchardt (Uppsala University) and Dr. Morten S. Riishuus (NordVulk). Her research focuses on the voluminous occurrence of silicic eruptive rocks in NE-Iceland, which is a prominent example of bimodal volcanism and may offer an answer to the long-standing controversy of crustal growth on early Earth. The EGU 2014 poster presented SIMS zircon U-Pb geochronology and δ18O zircon values from this remote region of NE-Iceland, which record that a complete and voluminous pulse of silicic magmatism was generated within ≤2 Myr. Rhyolite formation occurred through massive, but short-lived melting of hydrated basalts by intruding basaltic magmas during a rift relocation and a flare of the Iceland plume. By analogy, these new data suggest that melting of partly hydrated basalt suites was a key process during initial continent formation and would have occurred in pulses of ≤ 2 Myr.